Monday, October 15, 2012

Sandy Writes - In defence of the Thesaurus

I'm always interested to read what other writers having to say about their writing process, I have a Pinterest Board for Writers On Writing where I have begun to pin my favourites. There's not a lot there at the moment so I'm looking for suggestions if you've got one to recommend.

Sometimes I find myself disagreeing, even with someone as talented as Stephen King. His books are wonderful and I learned so much from his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, but when I he said: "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule", I had to shake my head. It's not like that for me at all.

I understand where he's coming from. The thesaurus is often consulted to find a 'better word' for a variety of reasons - more unique, more formal, more literary - and invariably a word chosen on such basis will ruin any sentence it is placed in.

But there are exceptions. There are are different ways to use a thesaurus. I open the thesaurus when the word I have in my head doesn't feel right - it doesn't match the feeling I have in my heart. I am rarely looking for a replacement word - I am looking for a different word that may set me thinking in a different direction. A word may lead to an image, almost never to a direct insertion.

I particular like how the Visual Thesaurus works in this way. Sometimes the word I end up with is not a synonym by a long shot, but it is a word that feels like it fits or helps me to find a more fitting string of words. The Visual Thesaurus is an organic way to search for a word. As you step out along the nodes the correlation between word and meaning widens but the correlation between word and feel is not lessened.